Pinterest often gets overlooked by travel advertisers focused on Google and Meta — but for certain travel businesses, particularly those with strong visual products and audiences who skew female or who are in early travel inspiration mode, Pinterest advertising deserves serious consideration. The platform’s search-discovery model and its association with future-planning make it a natural fit for travel brands. Here’s what tour operators and activity providers need to know.
What is a Pinterest Board?
Pinterest is organised around Boards — collections of saved images and links (called Pins) that users curate around specific themes. For travel, Pinterest boards are commonly themed around destinations, trip types, or travel styles (“Italy bucket list”, “adventure travel ideas”, “honeymoon destinations”). Users save Pins they find inspiring or useful, building collections they revisit during the planning phase. For tour operators, this means content pinned to a user’s travel board can resurface months after it was first saved — exactly the kind of long-consideration-window behaviour that travel brands need to be present for.
What goals can you meet through Pinterest ads?
Pinterest’s campaign objectives cover the core advertising goals: Brand Awareness (maximising impressions among target audiences), Video Views (for destination video content), Site Traffic (paying per click to drive visitors to specific tour or destination pages), and Conversions (optimising for enquiry submissions or direct bookings). For travel brands, we tend to see Pinterest work best as an upper-funnel channel — brand awareness and traffic campaigns that reach audiences in early destination inspiration mode, feeding consideration-stage activity on Google and Meta. In our experience, Pinterest converts less efficiently as a direct response channel than Google Ads, but earns strong results as part of an integrated funnel where it feeds awareness into other channels.
Who is your audience and how will you reach them?
Pinterest’s audience skews heavily toward users actively planning future purchases — the platform’s own research indicates a high proportion of its users use it specifically for future travel planning. For tour operators, this is a meaningful audience quality signal. Targeting on Pinterest combines keyword targeting (reaching users who are searching or saving pins related to specific destinations or travel styles), interest targeting (audiences interested in adventure travel, cultural tourism, family holidays), and audience matching (uploading your customer list to find similar users). What we’ve found is that Pinterest performs best for travel brands with strong destination-specific visual content — if you can produce high-quality imagery and video from your tours, the platform gives it a very receptive audience.
Get in touch
If you’d like to explore Pinterest advertising as part of your travel marketing strategy, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers.